Antarctic Summer

It’s Antarctic summer now, when temperatures are often a balmy –20 degrees Fahrenheit. Winter temperatures plummet to about -100 degrees Fahrenheit, and that, combined with the world’s driest air, makes it a struggle to even climb a flight of stairs. The air causes instant pain to any exposed skin. It’s not even wise to smile—your gums and teeth will ache. Frostbite can set in quickly.

On top of that, the South Pole is completely dark during the winter, when a reduced crew braves out the gloomy days inside the research station

There’s no native life in this vast, snowy desert nearly a thousand miles from the coast—“not even a mosquito,” Andy Martinez, the technical manager, said in a previous interview. “Humans are the only wildlife.”

Even British explorer Robert Falcon Scott, who raced Norwegian Roald Amundsen to the Pole in 1911 and 1912 and later died not far from it, described the South Pole as an “awful place.”